Home sweet home

So the seminar is over, and normal life has quickly reasserted itself as the only reality. I brought home with me a lot of thoughts about time and travel and maybe I'll write something about those one of these days.

I finally got to visit the Acropolis, which was something of a disappointment. Currently it is really just a big construction site. And although I understand and agree that you can't let millions of tourists to mess with the ancient monuments if you want to preserve them, being forced to look at them from a safe distance leaves me cold. It reminded me of my experience of Stonehenge. After trekking across the fields along the Avenue, it came as something of an anticlimax to circle the henge with dozens of tourists. These places leave me depressed rather than impressed.


If you think places like Acropolis or Stonehenge as landscapes, they are landscapes in the most sterile meaning of the word - something to be gazed at from outside. Maybe it has to do with the materiality of experience. You need to physically engage with the monuments to experience them - to walk among the columns, to see and feel the worn stone, to use yourself as the scale to begin to appreciate their immense size and the achievement it was to raise them. I am beginning to wonder if all this restoration and protection - an attempt to somehow keep the sites frozen in time - is really worthwhile. Maybe we should just let them decay and wander about the ruins.

On strike

Talk about some bad luck: today we had our fieldtrip day in the seminar, and of course the Greek decide to go in a general strike exactly then. Because the people looking after ancient sites and monuments are on the government payroll, the strike meant that they would be closed. Luckily in our first target, the Temple of Artemis in Brauron, the guard apparently had not heard about the strike yet and we got inside, and there is open access to the theatre in Thorikos. But there was a new fence around the silver mining remains in Laurion, and the Temple of Poseidon was closed - as well as the smaller remains of a temple of Athene nearby. There were quite a few disappointed tourists milling around at the last site.

However, despite the weather forecast which warned of a possibility of rain, the day turned out gorgeous, warm and sunny. And there were flowers of every colour everywhere. We had lunch in a taverna in Laurion and I boldly used what little Greek I can speak. Maybe we got special service due to that, since we had our food before other people from our party who had arrived earlier, and also got our bill with less problems. It always pays to learn the magic words in any language.

Tomorrow will be the last day of the seminar. This week has really flown by, and it has been both academically stimulating and socially enjoyable experience. I hope I shall meet some of the people here again in the future!

Sorry, we're closed

Did you know that all the museums and archaeological sites in Athens close at 3 pm? I imagined that we will have plenty of time to go and see the sights, but so far I have managed to see Acropolis from the roof terrace of our hotel, the National Archaeological Museum from the outside (contrary to the information in the tourist guide for February and March 2009 they are not open till 7.30 pm except on Mondays) and the temple of Zeus from behind a fence. The new Acropolis Museum (to be opened in March 2009) is not open to the public yet - but if it were, it certainly would be closed at 3 pm.

Athens

I'm in Athens then, in the Nordic PhD seminar for landscape archaeology. The flight was a bit rough from Paris onwards, because there was a lot of turbulence. I never get seasick but I nearly got airsick in that container called an aeroplane. Arrival made the suffering worthwhile, though. Our hotel is in a nice location close to the Akropolis and the Scandinavian Institutes. The weather is balmy. Food, wine and entertaining company are ready at reach.

The most unlikely thing happened: I had agreed to meet three other people at the airport, to share a taxi. While driving at a dangerous speed (considering none of us had our seatbelts fastened) towards the city, it turned out that all the three of us on the backseat had taken masters in landscape archaeology at the University of Leicester! Call that a coincidence!

Athens, here I come

Just a brief note: I am going to Athens in early April. A Nordic post-grad seminar will take place. The theme of the seminar is Landscape archaeology, to which the subject of my dissertation fits very well indeed. So I applied and was accepted. Amazingly enough, although I have been to Greece thrice, I have never been to Athens. That is the problem of business travels: you don't get to choose your destinations. Greece in April does not sound too bad, either, when we are still waiting for spring to come here in Helsinki.

Rafting on the river of Hades

Time flies, one week has already gone past. We work from the break of the day until the sunset, except for a four hours break for siesta in the afternoon. My job here is pretty boring to be honest, just augering to get soil samples. When I tried to show more interest, immediately after we came here, I was told (not quite in these exact words, but the message was this) that it is not my work here to think. Oh, great. Can you hear my motivation soaring?

So, instead of thinking, I went rafting on River Acheron today with some people from our field team. As you may or may not know, Acheron is the river of Hades. We managed to avoid the three-headed dog (well, actually he only had one head and looked pretty lame) and were safely back on the shore when I realized Kharon had extracted a payment for the trip, after all: my phone in its presumably water-tight plastic bag was dripping wet. I hope the ferryman will enjoy it as much as I did, in case it does not miraculously return to life.

But in case you try to text me, here is the explanation to why your messages are not getting through.

Summer away from home

It seems that besides excavating in Jordan in August I will be working in Greece for a couple of weeks in July. This is a familiar project I have been working for before, so no big excitement in the air. I just hope it is not going to be as hot as it was last time I was there a couple of years ago. You would think that Jordan in August is hot, but that is dry heat, which is much more tolerable than the sweltering Northern Greece.

On the bright side, the impending financial catastrophe of June and July is avoided. And nobody certainly told me to concentrate on Mediterranean archaeology. In a sense it has actually been a professional suicide, because with a history of working in the Eastern Mediterranean for the last decade I am never going to get a post in archaeology here in Finland.

Oh well, I have already decided that when my career in archaeology ends I will go over to real estate business.